UC head coach Mick CroninOpening Statement:“I know a lot of people are going to talk about 22-of-62 shooting from the field. Offensive this and offensive that. But we gave up 37 points in the second half. They shoot 50 percent from the field and 80 percent from three. We got the ball in bounds. Sean (Kilpatrick) should have brought the ball back out (after the rebound). He knows that.

“(Losing) never should have happened. We were up 47-32 and we stopped playing defense. We aren’t tough enough yet. I knew this was coming, but I failed to get the point across to my team. As hard as we tried (to tell them) at practice and as upset I was in practice about our performance against Jacksonville State, we aren’t tough enough to win yet. We have to win ugly right now, until Cheihk (Mbodj) and Jaquon Parker gets in there and our starting five realize that they can’t worry about offense; they have to stay focused on defense. Once we started worrying on offense, we went cold and it was over.

“We have a lot of work to do. This was coming. I told my team this was coming, and not in that nice of a tone. I didn’t get the job done with that. We aren’t a very good basketball team. Even if we had won, we are not a good basketball team. I’m disappointed because I thought my older guys knew. They are dominating freshman in practice right now. We have to make some changes. Right now, we aren’t good enough to win games and there’s a lot of false hope about who we are. Maybe this will be good for us. To be honest with you, I’m just worried about a way to find a way to win Monday night.”

On playing younger guys:“He (Ge’Lawn Guyn) did fine. I was happy with what he was doing. I’m going to have to start playing them more. Kelvin is obviously going to have to play more minutes. Kelvin will do what I tell him to do. His defensive hustle is there. The stuff that was going on the last 10 minutes on defense is beyond my comprehension. I really thought we had some guys that had gotten past that with our older guys. We aren’t tough enough.”

On UC’s defense in the second half: “It is laziness on different guy’s parts. They did a good job on their offense in their last eight minutes of running three actions. On the third one, we were too lazy to guard. That is the fact. On the third reversal, we broke down every time, and it wasn’t mutually exclusive.

“Our guys worried when they weren’t making shots on the offensive end. Winners know why the win. It’s because they focus on defense. I told these guys that we aren’t blowing people out. We have to just get the win. We aren’t that type of team. We don’t have seniors coming off the bench to drop the hammer. It isn’t realistic. It has been falling on deaf ears. We’ll see what we are made of at the end of the day. We are in some desperate need of some toughness.”

On laziness on defense:“They had 14 fast-break points to our two. That is a pretty telling stat when they only had three steals. How are they getting fast-break points? Guys are worrying about missed shots and not getting back. Worrying about things they can’t control, which is a characteristic of young guys. That is a mark of a young team. Veterans that do that are foolish because they think the game is over. That is not having respect for your opponent for 40 minutes and not playing defense. One way or another we are not going to give up those kinds of points. I don’t know who is going to play Monday night, but that is not going to happen.”

Cincinnati Player QuotesForward Yancy GatesOn reaction to loss:“It’s just frustrating. When you are up just as much as we were, it’s just a huge let-up.”

On Presbyterian’s run toward the end of game:“It was just us rushing. We got away from what had got us up, being patient, taking our time. We just started rushing off the pick and rolls, trying to hurry up, trying to rush up shots that really weren’t there yet. We just got away from what we were doing.”

On Gates trying to put the team on his back when UC was trailing in the first half:“I had just saw that the man that was guarding me, both of them, were slower and they weren’t doubling off like I had been seeing the last few nights, so I was able to get to the rim. I was just taking advantage of the mismatch, really. Maybe one night when we get down, it might be (Sean Kilpatrick) who brings us up, you never know. It is just really trying to take advantage of the mismatch.”

On moving on to the next game:“You just take it as a learning experience. Probably some guys think we are better than we are, probably not where some of the guys think we are yet. So, hopefully, we are humbled as a team. Instead of walking around all day, looking at the name on the jersey instead of going out there and playing, we just need to get back to practice tomorrow and get ready for the next game. Hopefully, it will help us be more focused and not really worry about our opponent, worry about us getting better.”

On expectations for nonconference schedule based on last year’s success:“We were a way different team last year. We had seniors coming off of our bench last year, now we have freshmen with Cheikh (Mbodj) and Park (Jaquan Parker) being hurt. I knew it wasn’t going to be as easy just because of the teams we are playing this year because we have younger guys who never played on this level. Teams like that have fifth-year seniors, guys that have played in games like this since they got in those schools. I was hoping for it (going undefeated in nonconference play), but not really assuming it.”

On Coach Cronin not substituting as much when the team is struggling compared to last season:“I think it is mainly younger guys on the bench. The past few years we had older guys on the bench. You make a mistake, you got guys that can come in and pick up at that same level without losing much. Now, you got guys who do not know what’s going on and can come in sometimes and not know what zone we are in. It is hard to rely on them as much as we did. We had (Darnell) Wilks coming in off the bench and Larry Davis.”

On possible fatigue due to starters playing a lot of minutes:“I don’t think so, that’s how many minutes we play in practice. Coach Cronin might put 40 minutes on the clock, so he has gotten us ready to play that amount of minutes. Plus, with the TV timeouts, it is easier because in practice he might stop once and play 15 minutes straight. I don’t think we got fatigued, I think we lost our focus that we have when we were running the score up.”

Guard Sean KilpatrickOn feeling confident after getting up by 15 points:“That is mostly our problem, especially with the fact that when we do get up, we stopped playing hard. It shouldn’t be that for a team to come back with open threes and doing everything they did. It is kind of frustrating.”

On whether or not to pull the ball out or attack the basket toward the end of the game:“I saw the lane but then again, like Coach said, I should have backed it out. It happens though. I was just trying to be aggressive at the wrong time.”

On thoughts in the huddle after Presbyterian’s go-ahead three-pointer:“Coach just told us that we needed a two. We knew that we were down and we tried to get it to the guys that were hot but as you saw, (Cashmere Wright) was getting doubled as he went up the court, so it is just frustrating.”

Presbyterian head coach Gregg NibertOn where that win ranks in program history:“That was the biggest win of ours, especially during the Division I transition, and obviously biggest one of the program. There’s no question about it to beat a storied program. Cincinnati is a heck of a team. We knew we had to play our absolute best game of the year and we were fortunate for Al’ Lonzo (Coleman) to get that rebound. Khalid wanted that shot and he deserved to take it, and he hit it.”

On what the game plan was in a nutshell:“Game plan in a nutshell was last week with the way Duke whipped us so bad, I didn’t have a zone in. We put a zone in last night, and that zone helped us slow the game down. We had to go to man-to-man the last 10 minutes, but we were fresh enough to play man-to-man, and we got some stops and we finally blocked out. They killed us on the boards, but I think the last five to 10 minutes we got some rebounds and we stopped them. Our game plan was to keep these guys in front of us and not let them go around us in man or a zone and, hopefully, they take outside shots and we can block them out.”

On Eric Washington coming in and giving them a spark:“You’re exactly right. He thought he could come in and guard anyone. To have six assists in a game like that, he thought he belonged. To have that kind of composure and toughness, and thinking he belonged was tremendous.”

On the importance of Presbyterian’s quick start to the game: “It was huge to start like that. We went to the zone as much as we could, and I think it really helped us start and stay fresh for when we needed to go to man-to-man.”